Mick Hartley

Here's another of those psychology experiments that's meant to prove something which, if anyone had bothered to formulate an opinion on, would have come as absolutely no surprise, but keeps the psychologists busy and allows the journalist to indulge in a little humourous reporting. The article goes under the heading, Does absurdist literature make you smarter? Giraffe carpet cleaner, it does! You see? We're already having fun! Giraffe carpet cleaner indeed!! 

The befuddled tramps in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot are a poetic personification of paralysis. But new research suggests the act of watching them actually does get us somewhere.

Absurdist literature, it appears, stimulates our brains.

That's the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Psychological Science. Psychologists Travis Proulx of the University of California, Santa Barbara and Steven Heine of the University of British Columbia report our ability to find patterns is stimulated when we are faced with the task of making sense of an absurd tale. What's more, this heightened capability carries over to unrelated tasks.

If you're interested in the methodology, you can check the article for yourselves. It's one of those scenarios where the struggle between your desire to comprehend and the detail of the set-up come into direct conflict, and as your desire to comprehend is undermined by the intrinsic dullness of the subject, you end up skipping bits and assuming they know what they're doing….

Undergraduates were split into three groups. The first group were told they were being assessed for participation in a reality TV program and given Finnegans Wake to read. The second group were insulted by a group of drunks (in reality volunteer accountancy students from a nearby college of further education), prodded with pointed sticks, and told to read copies of Pride and Prejudice where every character was re-named Barry. The third group were forcibly kidnapped, placed in a darkened room for eight hours, and then abandoned by the side of a freeway in Saskatchewan with a thermos flask of coffee, quantities of amphetamines, and a copy of On the Road, in Dutch.

All participants were then asked to make sense of a series of improbably ridiculous psychology experiments.  

It was found that 83% of participants performed better than the other 17%. 

"It's clear confirmation," said Professor Proulx-Heine, "that prolonged exposure to academic psychology reduces the ability to formulate sensible research strategies. Or indeed to formulate anything sensible at all. It is, however, a way of life that many find incapable of abandoning because of the large salaries involved."